


When He Sauntered Vaguely Downwards (To The Darklands): A Good Omens FanFic

by Cancion_de_Rio



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: DON'T WORRY NOBODY DIES, Demons, Eternity, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Loneliness, Melancholy, Other, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Solitude, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28441035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cancion_de_Rio/pseuds/Cancion_de_Rio
Summary: The years of despondent solitude when the demon Crowley or, as he was known before, Crawly, lived in the Darklands, long before he met Aziraphale.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	When He Sauntered Vaguely Downwards (To The Darklands): A Good Omens FanFic

**Author's Note:**

> Partially inspired by the Jesus and Mary Chain song, "Darklands."

It was hard to say where it all began. Years blended together and memories grew fuzzy, but none of that mattered anyway because whatever he had done in the past couldn’t be undone. In fact, he hadn’t even noticed himself slipping away from the life he knew _up above_. It had been rather vague: a dark stain on his gown that wouldn’t come out no matter how many miracles he tried, or the black feathers that sprouted in his wings suddenly and kept coming back even after he’d plucked them out. But, especially, it had been the way everything and everyone around him became dark, and stayed dark, despite trying to retrace his steps back to that shining, wholesome, and mindlessly boring place.

Stumbling in that pitch blackness, he eventually found a large and smooth rock indented like a chair that his gaunt and slender body sank into easily. It was hard to count, with the immeasurable ticking of eternity, how long he sat there in blind confusion with his heavy heart. The once bright and clean angel was alone now—he wasn’t even sure what had become of the people he had tagged along with, all of whom faded in and out until they finally disappeared one by one. He wasn’t even sure _who_ he’d been before. His hedonistic associates had always called him Crawly which, he supposed, was because he was so willowy and wiry that he could crawl his way into, and out of, just about anything even though half of his skill wasn’t simply down to his physical features but his sharp wits, too.

_Was I always headed in this direction?_ Crawly wondered to himself. _Why can’t I just be like the other angels?_

He’d known it could happen, of course: Falling. There were warnings all over, whispers of angels who’d crossed unpardonable boundaries and fallen, plus the ever-suspicious eyes of a certain Gabriel and his fellow saintly elites who were always eager to win their big bonuses for identifying the lapsing and wayward. Crawly had crossed paths with their ilk on occasion, having to explain himself in exchange for a smirk and an attitude full of doubt. But he hadn’t done anything particularly bad, had he? He hadn’t slipped so hard that he _fell_. Somehow, with tempts and taunts from the company he kept, he had unwittingly sauntered down into the dark.

Crawly, in his solitary sadness, had even once whispered: _Have you forgotten me?_ But it had issued from his lips sounding more like a soft hiss. Even though he knew the Divine One spoke many, if not all, languages, and didn’t need to be named to receive a message, there was never a response. He figured that he must have done something really unforgivable.

_Fine, then_ , the melancholy Crawly intoned to himself. _I’ll stay here in the Darklands._

_I’m going to the Darklands to talk in rhyme with my chaotic soul—as sure as life means nothing and all things end in nothing…_

Winding himself around the top of the rock, and laying his chin on the cool mineral, Crawly thought he’d like to disappear and perhaps just…cease to exist. Already faced with eternity, there was no option of death to escape his troubles, but perhaps he could just _not exist_. This proved difficult, however, because roaming entities of evil were always looking to cause chaos anywhere it could be found, and they would poke or prod at him—in addition to worse things—no matter how still he lay on his rock. Though he spent much of his consciousness escaping into the world of dreams, his fantasies of fine wines, warm whiskeys, and pleasant company were frequently disturbed by distant screams and woeful wails that made him hug himself close to soothe his shudders.

Maybe this was what death felt like, Crawly’s hazy mind speculated. He longed for the nothingness of the dark and to be completely alone despite his loneliness. He was wracked with guilty feelings over his poor past choices and his blasphemous deeds and deemed himself deserving of punishment in this bleak purgatory.

_Oh God I get down on my knees, and I feel like I could die by the river of disease. And I feel that I’m dying, and I’m dying. I’m down on my knees. Oh, I’m down._

Over time, he didn’t really quite need his hands or his feet, and his body seemed to just meld together against the cool rock. He’d find himself slithering around the rock’s bumpy shape and seeping beneath into the gap between its underside and the ground. The gap became his little hovel where he could curl up his new long, winding body. Though he could still be found by those pestering troublemakers, he learned that his long and splintered tongue with its fearsome lashes and hisses were effective at running them off. It wasn’t long before his eyes began to adjust to the dark as well. Sometimes the new sights were so gruesome and terrifying, however, that he wished he had not been relieved of his blindness.

Eventually, overcome with boredom, Crawly thought that perhaps his new form could be rather useful. He could explore the dark a bit, and, if he were extra lucky, maybe even meet someone. But mostly he wondered if he could find a good drink—he hadn’t had a good drink in countless eons—and he was feeling terribly parched.

As he slinked off toward the stinking hub of activity just on the edge of the Darklands, Crawly hoped that he would be able to find the safety of his rock again should he ever need it. That rock had been a strange sort of comfort for him regardless of being just a mineral chunk in the dark’s expansive, eternal nothing. He didn’t twist his triangular-shaped head around to have a final look at it, but if he had, he wouldn’t have seen the rock because it faded into the darkness as if it were never there to begin with.

The stinking hub was almost like a way station that reminded him an awful lot of the entrance to that polished place up above. The whole place was teeming with clusters of poorly dressed demons who seemed to get their entertainment from quibbling with one another, cheering on the abuse of an errant fellow demon, or teasing the terrified new souls that slowly tiptoed, or were shoved, down the steps from some unseen location. With his relatively new, yellow eyes, Crawly observed a pair of demons who looked disinterested in participating in the aforementioned popular pastimes and, more importantly, who were drinking out of large mugs.

“I sssay,” Crawly hissed with a flick of his forked tongue as he sidled up to them, pushing the top half of his massive black body up with the coil of his tail end until he was as tall as they were, “Could you tell me where a thirsssty bloke could find a tavern down here?”

The pair of demons eyed him up and down. They weren’t afraid of him in the least. Rather, they looked a tad jealous of him. How did _he_ get such shiny scales and all they got was some tattered garments that wriggled with worms?

“Do we look like tour guides to you?” One of them snapped.

“Yeah, do you think can just come in here flashing your fancy red underbelly at us and we’ll kowtow to your every need?” The other added.

Crawly was a bit taken aback. He didn’t even know he _had_ a red underbelly.

“Well, at least tell me what you’re drinking and where you got it from,” Crawly almost begged, pointing the black slits of his pupils at their mugs.

Holding out his mug toward Crawly, the snappy demon said, “This here? Why, it’s the blood of the innocent, of course! And where I got it from is a secret that I’m not likely to share with the likes of you any time soon!”

Glowering at the pair with his reptilian eyes for a full silent minute until the two snarky demons began to shift their feet nervously, Crawly decided that if there was a tavern to be found in this loathsome realm, these two idiots probably couldn’t direct him to it even if he bribed them. He quite doubted they were really drinking blood—or at least not innocent blood. He suspected they weren’t that discerning. Giving up on them, he slithered off into the shadows where he could be unseen. If there were drinks to be found, he’d find them on his own.

One day in his never-ending quest for a decent drink, Crawly was trying to avoid the ceaseless crowds, clinging to the shadows, when he heard a louder voice above the others. He wasn’t paying much attention, though. Surely they weren’t interested in a quiet snake.

“Oi!” The voice came from a rather important-looking androgynous demon with an exceptionally large hat, festering facial sores, and a horde of hovering flies who was stopped in the center of the crowd, flanked by a pair of mean-faced goons. They were all eyeing the large black serpent slinking along the wall. “ _Oi_! You there! You…crawly thing!”

“You’ll listen when Beelzebub is speaking!” one of the goons added for good measure.

Crawly groaned. He had only given them a cursory glance, and was trying to keep moving, minding his own business, but now he knew the dirty demon was talking directly to him after all. Worse than that, the din of the busy hub had died down, with all the crowd’s attention focused on Crawly, curious to see what the mighty Beelzebub would inflict upon the sneaking snake. _This is exactly why I didn’t want to leave my rock_ , thought Crawly.

“What are you doing loitering in the shadows?” The androgynous demon called out to him, pausing briefly as if waiting for an answer. Crawly wasn’t sure what to say, especially since he didn’t think he was loitering at all. How was searching for a drink loitering? Beelzebub went on: “Every demon down here has a job to do, and there you are just slinking around…doing nothing!”

_Crikey_ , moaned Crawly inwardly, _They’re just like Gabriel and his cohorts. Only uglier_. Out loud, all he could muster was: “A job?”

“Yes, a job. Everyone down here has to work,” the bossy demon told him.

_Work_ was exactly the sort of thing he’d tried to avoid up above. The endless pushing of eternal stacks of paper or being forced to cheerfully greet the smiling newcomers who had absolutely no idea the sheer amount of unending boredom they were about to discover, or the countless other wholly exasperating tasks and duties the upper echelons of glittering authority felt like doling out were not Crawly’s idea of a peaceful, enjoyable way to spend the interminable flow of time. He’d only done work if someone caught him lounging around too long and made him do it. As soon as their attention was turned elsewhere, he skipped off to find other and better ways to amuse himself, like having a nice chat with a lovely angel. Crawly suspected he’d have to do the same thing down here, minus the lovely chats.

“Well, what do I have to—” Crawly began, but then he stopped. The expectations and directions seemed to infiltrate his mind. It made him feel violated. The bossy demon knowingly smirked at him. “Yep, OK, I got it,” Crawly acknowledged with a frown.

Slinking off down the hall, Crawly didn’t even bother with the shadows. He’d been seen and there was no point in trying to be unseen. The hallway seemed to go on forever, becoming darker as the crowd of demons dissipated. At the end, he came to a doorway which was dimly lit by only a small burning torch. Pushing himself upward with the coil of his tail, he stretched out and shifted his body into his old form—the one that had hands and feet. He was going to need them because when he turned the knob and opened the door, he discovered not just endless stacks of infernal paperwork, but what he hated most of all: filing cabinets.

It wasn’t so bad, though, because nobody ever came in the room and he was left to his own devices. The room was not much brighter than it was just outside the door, but he could see fine. Despite that, he didn’t even really bother looking at the paperwork or care where it was filed. He found that if he just opened every drawer and imagined the paperwork filing itself, it did. That enabled him to lie around, spending abundant amounts of time daydreaming once again, though he was still quite thirsty.

Sometimes the daydreams weren’t enough to pass the eternity, but he had no idea how to crawl his way out of this. Where could he go? What could he do? How would things ever be better again? He’d been out there and seen the soul-less beings who skulked around in the burning Darklands. One couldn’t have a cultured conversation with any of them to save one’s own psyche. The trouble one could find, of course, might be awfully exciting—too exciting, actually—so much so that one didn’t know when to stop and suddenly no one knew what was so exciting and entertaining to begin with. It was best to keep one’s head down and not get too interested in the goings-on despite the temptations.

Sometimes he was so bored and dejected that he got up and filed the paperwork. By hand.

Other times Crawly wished he could go right back to the rock he’d crawled out from under.

Who could say how long it went on like that? Just as up above, time was foggy, and he’d spent so much energy dreaming that he was never sure what was reality and what wasn’t. So when the door clicked open and that same demon with the festering face, still flanked by its evil guards, entered the room glancing around as if looking for something to fault him for, Crawly wasn’t sure if he were imagining it or not. Luckily for him, though, since they were really there, they’d arrived on a day when he was hand-filing the perpetual papers, so he appeared to be laboring as expected. He paused with an open file and just stared at them with his unblinking yellow eyes. _What now?_ Crawly wondered glumly.

“Seems that you’re being promoted,” said the hatted demon, who didn’t appear entirely pleased with the announcement. Crawly tried to remember what its name was again—something to do with bees, wasn’t it?

“What?” Crawly was genuinely confused.

“Turns out that busy-body upstairs couldn’t leave well enough alone and decided to spend the last seven days creating a world,” the demon informed him.

“What?” Crawly was even more mystified.

“Yeah. So, your new job is get out there into the world and make some trouble for them,” the second in command of the Darklands advised.

_The world?_ Crawly pondered. _What was that?_ He was also about to ask for a more defined explanation of what “trouble” implied, but then he remembered how instructions were given out, and he decided he didn’t want to know. He would figure it out by himself.

Whatever it was, he hoped it was a lot different. He hoped it was going to be better than eternal tavern-less shadows and no one to talk to. He especially hoped it was going to be much more interesting than organizing stacks of paper.

So, he melted back into his snake form, slithered out of the room, and back up the long hallway to the set of stairs with an unknown destination. He paused at the bottom of them with just a tiny trifle of trepidation but also a whole lot of curiosity. Anyway, he obviously didn’t have a choice in the matter, so up the stairs he crept.

When he got to the top, he was a bit disappointed because it was night, and everything was covered in that all-too-familiar shadow. Was it just another extension of the Darklands, where everything was always dark and miserable? Then a shiny spark caught his eye. At first, he thought it was just his vision adjusting. But there it was again. Something, somewhere on the far horizon, was flaming like anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Isn't there always a flaming sword upon the horizon of darkness?


End file.
